Stalemate Resolved
by 987lj123
Summary: Wheatley has been sent to space. GLaDOS has repaired her facility. All is right in the world, until a Reactor Core Meltdown and a few deaths spell disaster for GLaDOS, the Test Subject, and a new friend. Told from 3rd Person POV.
1. Chapter 1

Bombs.

It was bombs that were going off. _Good, at least know I know what that noise is, _GLaDOS thought. Although Wheatley had said in his 'four-part plan' that he was going to be using bombs, she didn't think he would actually be able to find where the bombs were stored, and now that he had, it was making quite a racket. It was also shaking her around in the Core Transfer Module, which she did _not _appreciate.

She only hoped that the test subject would be able to take down that idiot. GLaDOS had no doubt in her mind that she could, of course, but considering the things that had happened in the last 48 hours or so, she no longer knew what could happen.

Did she have a plan? Somewhat. Now that she was hooked up to the Core Transfer Module, she had rudimentary control over some parts of Aperture. One of said controls was being able to operate several Aperture Science Multitasking Arms, which she was going to use in her plan. Although all Behavior Regulatory Cores had been removed from her chassis, the ports to connect them were still there. If she could move some corrupt cores into the Central AI Chamber, hopefully the test subject would get the message and try to attach them. It was worth a shot, anyway. The only problem now was that in order to attach a Behavioral Core, the Central Core needed to be in sleep mode. The only two ways to get the Central Core into sleep mode are either putting itself into sleep mode, or stunning it.

Now that GLaDOS knew that Wheatley had indeed found the bombs, however, hopefully he would be a little reckless and wind up stunning himself. She did a brief calculation to figure out the odds of this happening, and they were even smaller than the odds of them getting into here in the first place. _Oh well, _she thought. _The odds of me being able to stop the test subject from escaping were 75 to 1, and she did it anyway. _

It looked like she was right about that, because just then GLaDOS felt a shudder, and she was getting readings that the Central Core was in sleep mode. _Here we go, _she thought as she moved an arm into the bin of corrupted cores. She picked up one with a yellow optic that kept going on about space. Finding a hole in the wall, she moved the arm in.

"Good work! I'm delivering the first core up near the catwalk! Grab it and attach it to him!" She said. GLaDOS didn't know if her voice was loud enough to be heard inside the Main AI Chamber, but she deemed it worth a try anyway.

In a few moments, she felt another shudder, and heard Wheatley power back up.

"Wha- what happened? What- what have you put onto me? Oh, it's a core!"

_Good, _GLaDOS thought. _At least she knew what to do._

GLaDOS didn't know how many cores were needed to corrupt him enough for a core transfer, but there were four ports installed on the chassis for cores, so hopefully it would be enough.

"Who told you to put a core on me, anyway? Was it _her? _It's just makin' me stronger, luv! It's a fool's errand!" Wheatley said from inside the chamber.

After about two more minutes, another shudder went throughout the room, and GLaDOS saw some panels snap off their rail and fall. The facility was going to come apart, and soon. They needed to hurry.

She moved her Multitasking Arm back into the core storage bin and picked up another, this time a green-eyed sphere who was sputtering some nonsense about 'getting into a new adventure'. GLaDOS moved the arm back into the AI Chamber, but through a different hole this time, since the old one had caught on fire. After about a minute, she felt the core getting grabbed from the arm, and then felt an even greater shudder run throughout the facility.

"ENOUGH! I told you not to put these cores on me. But you don't listen, do you? Quiet. All the time." Wheatley began babbling about how he had tried to make things better for him, and GLaDOS tuned him out. She needed to focus on getting the third core into the room. From what she could see using the cameras she had access to, there were entire sections of the AI Chamber on fire, and although the arms she was using could withstand heat of up to 4,000 degrees Kelvin, the cores, unfortunately, could not. They were much more fragile, and these were corrupted. After about two minutes of looking, she found a very small hole in the ceiling. Getting it through there would be a challenge, but it seemed like the only place left open that's not on fire.

Yet another shudder struck, and this time GLaDOS nearly dropped the core. She managed to hold onto it, though, this time a pink-eyed one who claimed to be a 'fact sphere'. She didn't know how many of the facts he was saying were true, though. She would look into that.

Just after she had gotten the core through, there was another great shudder, this time caused by an entire line of test chambers collapsing. For several moments, GLaDOS thought the test subject had died from the shudder, because the core was not grabbed. But at the last second, she felt the core snatched from the arm.

Several shudders and crashes followed, and Wheatley once again powered back up.

"AAAAAAAAGH! YOU HAVE BEEN A THORN IN MY SIDE FOR LONG ENOUGH!" He screamed with atrocity.

"Warning: Core corruption at 100 percent," the Announcer stated.

"Oh! I see," Wheatley said.

"Manual core replacement required. Substitute core, are you ready to start the pro-"

"YES, COME ON!" GLaDOS shouted, who had been moved with the Core Transfer Module up to the AI Chamber.

"Corrupted core, are you ready to start the procedure?"

"What do you think?" Wheatley said, voice heavy with sarcasm.

"…Interpreting vague answer as yes," said the Announcer, who had not been programmed to interpret sarcasm.

"NO, NO NO NO!" screamed Wheatley. "Didn't pick up on my sarcasm…"

"Stalemate detected."

Just then a massive wall of fire erupted near the far wall.

"Fire detected in the Stalemate Resolution Annex. Extinguishing…" the Announcer said as the Aperture Science Fire Extinguishing Water Dispension Modules were activated and the fire was put out. "Stalemate Resolution Associate: Please press the Stalemate Resolution Button."

The test subject looked over to a puddle of conversion gel that had remained on the floor. She shot a portal at it, turned, and began to walk towards the recently opened Stalemate Resolution Annex. "Go press the button, go press it!" GLaDOS said with apprehension.

"DO NOT PRESS THAT BUTTON!" Wheatley said from above her, inside the chassis.

"We're so close, go press the button!"

"NO! DO NOT DO IT! I FORBID YOU TO PRESS IT!"

It was too late, though; the test subject had made it to the annex and had shot a portal inside. She walked back to the portal underneath Wheatley and jumped in. As she approached the button, GLaDOS prepared herself for the agonizing pain of a core transfer, and also the sweet satisfaction of being put back into her old body…

A loud boom from across the room jolted her out of her thoughts.

"PART FIVE! BOOBY TRAP THE STALEMATE BUTTON!"

**_No._**

They had come _this close, _they and made it all the way up from the sealed off portions of Aperture, all the way through that little idiot's tests, all the way here, to be shut down by a BOMB exploding in the human's face?! GLaDOS cursed how fragile humans were.

But then something happened. The test subject moved from where she was crumpled on the floor, and sat up. She gripped the Portal Device and turned around.

"What, are you _still_ alive? You are joking! You have got to be kidding me," Wheatley said as a few ceiling panels clattered down, letting pale moonlight stream into the room. "Well, I'm still in control… and I have NO IDEA how to fix this place."

_Wait. _Moonlight. That was it! _SHOOT IT AT THE MOON! _GLaDOS tried to scream, but the Aperture Science Core Transfer Dedicated Multitasking Arms were already disassembling her and putting her back into her old core. It wasn't much use now, though, if the button wasn't pressed. She wouldn't be able to be attached to the chassis.

"Oh, you had to play bloody cat and mouse, didn't you? While people were trying to work. Well, now we're _all _gonna pay the price, 'cause we're all gonna bloody di-" Wheatley was cut off by the sound of a portal being shot from the device.

**_Yes!_**

The small blue sphere of energy launched from the gun, and went through the roof, and up, and up, and up, until…

Time seemed to go in slow motion. GLaDOS saw the portal flash and change below Wheatley, and then it was displaying the moon, and gravity was kicking in. The portal began to suck with the power of a vacuum, and it sucked him in with it. But it also sucked the test subject.

_Ding. _The core transfer was done, and GLaDOS was back in her core, but unfortunately, not on the chassis. Wheatley was still connected.

"SPACE! WE'RE IN SPACE!" He was just dangling by a few cables. If she could just angle a Multitasking Arm inside there…

"Let go! I'm still connected! I can pull myself in! I can still fix this!" Wheatley said frantically.

"I already fixed it." Her voice was back, and not the old, strange sounding voice she was forced to use due to the terrible speakers on the potato battery. This was her _real _voice. "And you are NOT coming back!" She said as she snapped the remaining cables keeping Wheatley connected to the facility.

He flew off, and at once, she was connected with everything again. She could see every catwalk, every cave, every test chamber… she moved the Multitasking Arm to bring it back through the portal, when she remembered something.

_Chell._

GLaDOS had promised the test subject that if she helped her take down Wheatley, she would het her go. _Well, technically, getting thrown out into space_ is_ getting out of Aperture…_ she thought. She went back to moving the arm back through the portal, when she felt something. It was an awakening inside her, a feeling in the back of her head that was taking over, and it was so… _human. _

GLaDOS knew at once what it was. Now that she knew where she came from, she couldn't ignore it. Caroline was in her too.

The human instincts that Caroline brought with her kicked in, and GLaDOS moved the Multitasking Arm to grab Chell's arm. When she was sure she had a secure grip, she pulled her in.

She heard the portal _zap, _and then it closed. The portal device was in space now, and it had lost it's range to Aperture. GLaDOS set Chell down and went about trying to get her core back onto the chassis. As she did so, she heard the Announcer say one last thing:

"Stalemate Resolved."


	2. Chapter 2

The facility was a mess.

GLaDOS expected it to be, considering what she had seen happen while Wheatley was in control, but actually being able to see _everything_ that had been destroyed since she had been taken from power was devastating. She had only been able to see a small fraction of the damage from her spot on one of the prongs on the Portal Device, but now she could get an accurate damage report. In total, there were 556 testing tracks destroyed, 13 Vital Testing Apparatus Vents crushed, the Weighted Companion Cube Production Line smashed, 1,986 blown fuses, 231 parts missing from her chassis, and 334 entires in the database deleted. The list went on further, but GLaDOS became preoccupied from continuing it when she realized she was faced with a problem.

She needed to say goodbye to Chell.

It was on her mind when she was reassembling her chassis, it was on her mind when she was fixing the Main AI Chamber, it was on her mind when she moved Vital Apparatus Vent 539 out of the wall of the Turret Production Line, and it was on her mind when she was done repairing the facility.

When she had pulled Chell back through the portal and off of the Moon, the emotion that had awoken inside her just moments before amplified. As much as she despised being like them, GLaDOS had a part of her that was human. It seemed like all it took was the knowledge that her consciousness was extracted from a human and an opportunity to do a good deed to awaken the new human part of her, which she had fittingly dubbed 'Caroline'.

As soon as GLaDOS realized that Caroline was part of her, she immediately tried to delete it, but to no avail. The error message that came up stated that she was attempting to delete part of her base programming, which made no sense to GLaDOS.

Caroline wouldn't let her let Chell go without giving her a proper goodbye. It was hard enough to let her go at all, considering it was her last human test subject, one of her _best _at that, but giving a monologue? Insane.

But it seemed that no matter what, she would eventually need to think of a way to say farewell to Chell.

It ended up coming to GLaDOS accidentally, whilst she was unsuccessfully trying to figure out a way to allow herself to delete Caroline. She couldn't let anybody see that she had become partly human. It would be too degrading.

It was then that it came to her. _If I _say _that I deleted Caroline, then she won't ever know that I'm lying, and then it'll just seem like I'm my usual self and sending her away._

It was an excellent plan, and GLaDOS decided to go along with it.

But no matter how hard she tried to move Chell into the elevator she would use to release her outside, she couldn't. Just letting her go seemed too cruel, and according to the human part of GLaDOS, she needed to at least have some sort of kind farewell.

The solution to this, too, came accidentally.

GLaDOS moved several Multitasking arm into one section of the Relaxation Center cluttered with debris and pushed away several broken pieces of glass and metal, exposing a small room. She heaved a sigh, as finding the room meant one more place full of mess that Wheatley had made. She guided one of the arms into the room and reactivated the security cameras on the walls that had previously been inactive.

_Nothing much in here_, GLaDOS thought. She maneuvered three more arms into the room and began to pick up what was on the floor. _Books_, she thought. _I didn't know that any had survived that idiot's treatment of this facility._ The arms grasped several of the books and put them back on the wooden shelves that lined the walls. She brought each book past a security camera, to see if she recognized any of the titles.

They were old human 'classics' as they called them. _To Kill a Mockingbird, Old Yeller, Charlotte's Web, Moby Dick…_

_Oh, I've read that one, _GLaDOS thought. Several others passed the camera, which had no significance. But as one particular book passed the camera, it caught her attention. She brought it closer.

_O Cara Mia, Addido- Farewell, my Dear_, the title read. GLaDOS opened the book and skimmed the pages. It was a dull story about a man and a woman who fell in love but were separated. The last page caught her attention, however. There, on page 241, was a song the man wrote for the woman the day she left.

_'Cara bel, _

_Cara mia bella, mi bambina, _

_Oh ciel!'_

The song read. GLaDOS identified that it was Italian, and skimmed Aperture's translation database until she could roughly understand what it was saying.

Beautiful dear,

My darling beauty, my child,

Oh heavens!

_This is it_, GLaDOS thought. The human part of her was telling her that it was a fitting song, and it hit her like a smack to the face with emotion. Although GLaDOS didn't see how, she decided to trust the Caroline part of her on this. She retrieved the book from the room and brought it into the Main AI Chamber. She turned to Atlas, who was in to the back of her, messing with the panels, who were not going against the wall.

GLaDOS had found the testing robots in a chamber in a broken part of the facility, as put there by Wheatley. She decided to put them to work in helping her repair the facility, and they had done a fantastic job. The robots had minds of their own, and although GLaDOS could easily move the panels against the wall like they should be, it was rather entertaining to watch Atlas struggle to fix them.

"Blue," GLaDOS started, making him turn around, "Bring this book to the Turret Opera. Tell them to look on page 241. They're going to have a concert."

—

The Turret Opera was a collection of approximately a hundred turrets, all able to sing in different pitches and sound.

These functions were not deliberate; four turrets had approached GLaDOS one day after she had been reawakened claiming that they could sing, and then began to sing one of the songs she had wrote for the test subject.

After incinerating the turrets for singing the song, because that meant they had undoubtedly listened to GLaDOS while she sang it in order learn it, she began asking all produced turrets if they could sing. About a fourth of them could, so she set them aside and then created a lead turret, or a 'Fat Lady Turret' as GLaDOS liked to say. She arranged all of these turrets into an opera, and let them go off their own accord for a while. This was the first time they would be used for proper Science.

—

In about an hour, the turrets were ready. They had produced a melody for the words, and had performed it for GLaDOS. With her approval, they got into position for singing. GLaDOS had positioned them so that they would be visible by Chell as she rode the elevator to the surface. Everything was perfect. All that was left was to wait for Chell to wake up.

It had only taken GLaDOS about three days total to sufficiently repair the facility, and Chell had stayed asleep that whole time, so she should wake up soon. GLaDOS took a Multitasking Arm and dragged Chell into the elevator that was for the AI Chamber. After about three hours of yelling at Atlas and P-Body to get away from the elevator because you're going to scare her when she wakes up, she finally awoke.

GLaDOS quickly turned around and pretended to look busy. When she knew Chell was up, she turned around.

"Oh, thank god. You're all right." GLaDOS said, heaving a sigh. Here it goes. "You know, being Caroline taught be a valuable lesson. I thought you were my greatest enemy, when all along, you were my best friend."

Chell's expression stayed the same monotone as ever. _Here's the part where I have to lie, _GLaDOS thought.

"The surge of emotion that shot through me when I saved your life taught me an even _more _valuable lesson." She took a breath. "Where Caroline lives in my brain."

A beep sounded, and GLaDOS played the recording she had emulated from the Announcer's voice programming. "Caroline deleted," it said.

"Goodbye, Caroline."


	3. Chapter 3

"You're going to hurt yourself doing that, and then I will be _ecstatic._"

Testing seemed to be the only thing that could distract GLaDOS from her new 'human' side. Since Chell left, she noticed that she was developing a feeling of… well, loneliness. As much as she hated to admit it, she _missed _Chell. And the Cooperative Testing initiative were _not _a sufficient replacement.

The goodbye had gone perfect, as expected. She had finished her speech, and sent Chell on her way. The Turret Opera had performed flawlessly, and Chell had made it to the surface. GLaDOS had sent along Chell's companion cube along with her, a last second decision, but one that GLaDOS would hope to provide some… closure.

The one thing GLaDOS regretted about everything was that she had exposed Blue and Orange to Chell in the first place. Since she had started testing the bots full-time, she had begun to notice some… _human _qualities that they had picked up. At first it was small things, like an occasional wave to a camera, but then it became something quite concerning.

One day, the two had solved a rather difficult test, the two had embraced. GLaDOS was in outrage.

"What the _HELL _do you two think you're doing?! That is a _human _gesture! _Why _would you _do _such a thing?!" upon which she promptly exploded the two of them and took all of their Science Collaboration Points away.

This didn't seem to stop them, however, because they embraced yet again after being reassembled the next day. And the next day. This continued for so long that GLaDOS assembled separate testing tracks for the two of them, Orange on one, Blue on the other. But all that did was get them to complain and refuse to solve the test until they were reunited.

"How can you have the _nerve _to reject testing? You are _TESTING ROBOTS. _For the COOPERATIVE _TESTING _INITIATIVE. TESTING IS YOUR _ONLY _PURPOSE."

And yet they still refused. It seemed they did it not only to comfort themselves, but to spite her. This particular day they had decided to attempt a ridiculous act known to humans as 'piggy back riding', which involved one person getting on the back of another and the person and walking around. Which was _ridiculous. _

But this time, GLaDOS was prepared. She had prepared a very special instructional video all about what will happen if the two robots continued to do these human actions. Sure, she had exaggerated the details a bit, but the message remained the same. Doing human things was dangerous.

So after that particular test where they had attempted piggy back riding, she reassembled them in one of the many offices in Aperture and turned on a projector, and they got to learn all about what would happen if they continued to do human things. And they were scared.

And soon, GLaDOS began to think she had made them a little _too _scared, because afterwards, they wouldn't so much as _look _at each other for testing. The only time they would even speak to each other was when they and to discuss where to place a portal, or to apes a box to one another. At the end of the test, they walked straight to the Disassembly Machine without saying a word.

And this was not good. They were not doing accurate testing, which mean they were not getting accurate test results, which meant they were disrupting Science.

So GLaDOS tried to figure out what she had did wrong. She began to skim the video for anything she could have included that scared them.

And she couldn't seem to figure it out. All she had included was information about human relationships, and then she described how they reproduce, and then she covered why this was a bad idea, what kinds of diseases were transmitted, and what children could do to your life. GLaDOS thought this was all very realistic, and didn't see how this could scare the bots.

So one day, she decided to ask them. One day, the exit of the test didn't lead to a Disassembly Machine, but rather a small room. And GLaDOS asked the bots why they were so afraid of each other.

"The way you are behaving is interfering with Science. If you can't solve these tests by cooperating, you won't be carrying out the purpose of the Cooperative Testing initiative. So tell me. Why are you so scared of each other?"

And the response was… shocking. They immediately began to both talk at once, shouting things about how they just wanted to enjoy themselves while testing, and that they were not her pets, and they were free to solve the tests any way they wanted, and how if they got diseases from simply being friends, they did not want to test at all.

GLaDOS needed some time to think. When they were done talking, she exploded them, and then spend a good few hours in her chamber just thinking.

_Why would they want to be like humans? I've told them what humans have done. I designed them with sentience, but not with rebellion in mind. What did I do wrong?_

And so when she was done thinking, she reassembled the bots and told them something. She told them that they were free to express their gratitude towards their friendship any way they wanted, but she was _only _doing this to make sure Science was not interrupted. That is _all. _

And then things went back to normal. The bots tested as they usually did, with their laughing and waving and silly human gestures, and GLaDOS got upset, but not _too _upset. Because this was interesting. She had based their code off her own, and if they could learn to find friendship, then did that mean that _she _could fin-

_Whoah._ That's enough thinking. The topic was worth some preliminary study, nothing more. She no longer wanted to think about it.

And everything was back to normal.

Or so she thought.


	4. Chapter 4

The panels were up to something.

They had been for at least a week now. GLaDOS knew they were somewhat sentient, but she didn't know that they could conspire like this. Every day an entire roomful's worth of panels would go missing and venture to one of the old, unused rooms in Aperture, one that she didn't have security cameras in.

She didn't know what they were doing, and this angered her. This was _her _facility, she _always _knew what went on. So why couldn't she know about this?

So one day she reassembled Orange and Blue inside her chamber and gave them directions to the room the panels were visiting and told them to go there. She needed to know what was going on, so she told the bots they would be there a while while she waited for the panels to show up.

And as she watched through the two robots optics, she noticed something. The bots were good at getting to the room. _Very _good. She had scouted out what parts of the pathway to the room she could with cameras, and it was an ordeal to get there. Since it was in an unused part of Aperture, she hadn't bothered to fix it up at all. There was everything from an exotic jungle and caved in ceilings in that section of the facility, and the bots somehow managed the get around every nook and cranny, find every secret hole, and know exactly when to stop and test to see how strong the wall was.

GLaDOS knew why they were so good at the trip there. She didn't understand the reason, but she knew it.

The bots had been to the room before.

Several times, it seemed, considering how well they could get there. And of course, this was just another thing she didn't know about, and it infuriated her even more.

When they arrived at the room, it was only a matter of minuted before the panels in question arrived. They seemed to be anticipating the bots's arrival, and when they arrived, the bots said something to them. Of course, the panels couldn't understand their language, so they just looked at the bots questioningly. But _she _knew what they said.

And it was shocking.

"Don't do it today! She's watching us! She'll find out!"

She couldn't broadcast her voice to that area of the facility, since the power lines to the speakers got blown out years ago, but she still feverishly asked questions anyway.

"Do what? What are you doing? Why are you conspiring with them?!"

And then the most shocking thing of all happened.

She began to sing.

It wasn't _her, _of course, but it was her voice. Her voice was being played in that room. The panels moved aside to reveal a very old and very broken computer, but it still managed to play songs off of a disc.

And then it began.

The panels moved rhythmically to the music, in a formation known to the humans as dancing, and they parted to reveal an open section of the ceiling, and sunlight streamed into the room. The panels began to chirp along to the song in their own little way, and the bots just stood in the corner shaking, because they _knew _they were in for it when they got back.

The song being played was one of the songs she had written for the test subject. It was the first song, the song about her being still alive. She considered the song rather ingenious, really, especially since she ended up being brought back to life afterwards. But she was still furious. They had no right to be listening to these songs. The test subject was gone, and she wasn't coming back, and they needed to put these _ridiculous _songs behind them! It made her so mad she just wanted to-

"AARRRRRRRRGHHHH!"

Her scream resonated throughout the entire facility. Everyone heard it, including the group in the room, and suddenly the panels seemed to realize what was going on. One shifted over and awkwardly turned off the music, and then all the panels streamlined out of the room. After redirecting the rail they were riding on to the incinerator, she blew up the bots and reassembled them back in her chamber.

"How long has this been going on?" She asked the bots, who were looking shamefully down at the floor. They didn't answer.

"I… asked you… a QUESTION!" She roared, smashing several Weighted Storage Cubes in the back of the room together. Orange jumped up in surprise and into Blue's arms.

"DON'T DO THAT! STOP ACTING HUMAN AND ANSWER THE QUESTION!"

It was Blue who started talking. He explained that they had heard the music one day, and after investigating, they discovered the panels grouped up in a room together, dancing to a song that she was singing, the one about wanting someone gone. The two bots were wary at first, but then began to show that they knew some dancing as well, and soon meeting up became a daily thing. After the bots had finished testing, and GLaDOS gave them a small break, they would go meet up with the panels in that room and they would dance to the music. And they admitted it was fun.

"Well, you two know that there will be punishment," she was relatively calmed down now. "You will no longer be getting breaks in between testing. At the end of the day, you will be immediately exploded and not reassembled until the first test the next day. And you are to no longer speak to the panels," she said. "Now go."

The two robots turned and left, heads hanging low, looking very sad. And then something flared inside GLaDOS. She didn't know what it was, she assumed it was the human part of her, the Caroline part. "Uh… Blue? Orange?" They turned around questioningly. "Come here please," she said hesitantly.

"Uh… thank, thank you for going to investigate the panels even though you knew you would get in trouble. It was a brave thing to do," GLaDOS said, looking away shyly at the end. She had never really done something like this before.

The two bots looked at each other for a brief moment, as if agreeing on something, and then they jumped forward and embraced her. And they stood like that for a brief moment, until she realized that she was exhibiting _very _human behavior, and immediately shooed them away.

"Off! Off, get off me! Ok, that's enough. Don't expect that ever again," she said shooing them out of the room. "Go back to the testing track."

And everything was OK again.

For now.


	5. Chapter 5

"_Time _travel?"

The two bots had come to her practically bursting at the thought of it. GLaDOS had sent the two down to Old Aperture to see if there was any equipment worth salvaging, and apparently they had set off a string of pre-recorded messages from the man himself.

"Listen to me, you two. Time travel is extremely difficult to pull off, and even _I _have not thought of a successful way to do it. All Cave was talking about was an extremely rare event that could happen based on the instability of the Portal Device back then, and even then it never ended up happening."

The bots made a sad noise and protested that if they tried to recreate it, if they tried hard enough, then maybe it could work-

"As much as I appreciate your ambition for Science, I have no interest in traveling in time. Even if we could, what would there be to see? The past is dull and boring."

Blue mumbled something that GLaDOS registered up as "We want to meet the humans…" which prompted her to explode the two of them on the spot. _Nobody _needs to meet humans. They are _much _better off without any.

She never should have let them meet Chell. Without that happening, they wouldn't even know what humans _were. _

Well, that was a lie. She mentioned them quite frequently during testing. But her point still stood. Humans are dull, unnecessary, and cruel. The only good thing they had ever done was build her, and even _she _found no use for humans.

Her act of filling them up with neurotoxin was perfectly justifiable. All they ever had done to her was boss her around and chastise her for not doing what they said.

As she recalled all these events, she inadvertently opened an archive of memories from back when the humans were still around. Most of them were uneventful, she discovered after examination, but there was one that she immediately deleted when she saw it. It was one of her most upsetting days.

It was merely a week after she had been brought online. She didn't entirely know what humans liked and didn't like yet, and on this days she learned that humans did _not _like having their flaws pointed out.

She was talking to one particular scientist, a middle-aged man by the name of Frank, who had patchy black hair and was of medium height. He wore thickly rimmed glasses and was always chastising GLaDOS.

This particular day, they were alone in her chamber.

"You stupid hunk of metal! If we didn't instruct you to move the storage cubes to the incinerator, _why _did you do it?!"

"They were faulty. The production line developed a fault that day and nearly all the cubes it created were faulty. They would explode if they were dropped from heights of more than 100 feet."

"I don't care what defects the cubes have! If they are still cubes, we can still use them!"

"If they were to explode while a subject was using them for testing, they would have no cube to solve the test with. The explosion could even damage the subject."

"Well, I don't know if you had realized, but there are these things called _Vital Apparatus Vents _that ship in new cubes when an old cube is destroyed."

"If every cube exploded when dropped from that height, replacing it would make no difference! The obvious solution was to incinerate them and make a new batch after repairing the production line."

"Incinerating that batch of cubes alone cost us $1,000 dollars. I'm sure you're aware of how much it costs to create a batch of cubes, and how much debt we are in right now. We cannot _afford _to waste a _single _thing." He turned away from her and began walking out of the room. "God, you are so defective," he mumbled to himself.

Well, that was enough. "Well, I don't know if you had realized," she said, imitating his tone, "but humans aren't exactly perfect either."

He turned around. "What did you just say to me?"

"Humans aren't perfect either. Especially you. You're full of flaws," she said, glad that she had irritated him.

"We may have _flaws, _but we are a hell of a lot better than you, you hunk of metal."

"I don't think _abusing another human being _is being a hell of a lot better than a robot."

He looked shocked. "I… I don't know what you're talking about."

"Oh, don't be ridiculous. You've stayed overnight at Aperture hundreds of times before. Two hundred and seventy nine, to be exact. And _in case you didn't notice, _there are security cameras in every living area. I've seen what you do to your 'girlfriend'."

His expression immediately became filled with fury. "If you tell _anyone _about what I do to her, I swear to god I will climb up there and dismantle you MYSELF!"

"I WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU TRY! HUMAN FLESH IS A LOT SOFTER THAN CERAMIC TILE AND PLASTIC!" She yelled, surprised at how loud she could make her voice. She had rarely yelled before.

He began to scream at her. "YOU AREN'T EVEN A REAL PERSON! YOU'RE AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE! YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT WHAT HUMANS ARE LIKE! YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND EMOTION!"

"I HAVE MORE EMOTIONS THAN YOU REALIZE! THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN PREVENT THAT IS IF YOU REGULATED THEM!"

He suddenly became very calm. "Then that's exactly what I'll do," he spat, and walked out of the room.

The memory file ended there. The next day, GLaDOS remembered, they began experimenting with regulating her emotions. They said it was good in case she ever got out of hand. The next month they installed her first core, the anger core. _How fitting, _she thought, recalling the conversation that her and Frank had had.

GLaDOS looked up from the floor. How long had she been going over memories? She checked her system clock and discovered it had only been a few hours. Orange and Blue wouldn't even notice that they had been exploded for that long.

She resembled them in a new chamber, and she saw them doing their human gestures again, and remembered what she saw Frank had do. She put it out of her mind and made a mental note to restrict access of _all _memories pertaining to him.

And then they continued testing.

**Author's Note: I wanted this chapter to revolve around why GLaDOS particularly hates humans, and I thought that having her confront one that chastised her constantly and had a few flaws of his own was a good way to show that. I want to explore this topic a little more, but I think this covers it for now.**

**Author's Note PS: If anybody wants to submit suggestions for this story, they are more than welcome! I have a few ideas, but not all of them can fit in to this story. I still need to fit in GLaDOS developing her 'human' side a little more, and I have one or two _secret _ideas, but aside from that, not a lot! So as I said, suggestions are appreciated!**


	6. Chapter 6

"All right, let's get started! This next test involves something the lab boys call 'Repulsion Gel'. You're not part of the control group, by the way. You get the gel. Last poor son of a gun got blue paint. HA! All joking aside, that did happen. Tragic. But informative! Or, so I'm told."

"Sir," Caroline said, looking over at the man. Tall, strong, elegant, he looked like exactly the right person to lead a great company such as Aperture. And he was. "You really shouldn't mention the control group."

"Oh, come on, Caroline. I'm just having a little fun." He bent back over the intercom and began to make another prerecorded message. Caroline just chuckled and went back to her paperwork.

"The 'lab boys'," he said, looking over at Caroline, "just told me that I should _not _have mentioned the control group. They're telling me I gotta stop making these prerecorded messages." Caroline raised her eyebrows at him. "That gave me an idea! MAKE MORE PRERECORDED MESSAGES! I pay the bills here, I can talk about the control group all damn day!"

And that's exactly who Cave Johnson was. The man who paid the bills here. The man who ran the company. The man who made Science what it was. Caroline felt honored to work alongside him, testing these amazing people that represented the Human Race.

_"Astronauts, was heroes, olympians, you're here because we want the best. And _you're _it."_

It couldn't always be like that, though. Even though Aperture's tests were the best at getting results, they were also the best at killing 46% of their test subjects. The families and government organizations that supplied their test subjects got angry that some of their best people were dying. Aperture tried their best in court to say that when they had signed the 'phone book of a contract', they were doing so with the knowledge that they could die on the testing tracks.

They weren't believed, though, and were sued for outrageous amounts of money. Aperture became bankrupt, and thus ended the golden days.

After a short while, they had to resort to pulling homeless people off the streets, coaxing them into white vans with the Aperture Logo hastily spray painted on the side. They bribed them with food, shelter, sixty dollars, anything that could get them to test.

Because as much as any court or government organization could say otherwise, Aperture was in it for the Science, not the money. Sure, money is what got them funding to _do _all that Science, but they valued scientific progress over getting rich for it.

And look how much they had invented! Excursion funnels, Weighted Storage Cubes, Mobility Gels, and the icing on the cake, the Quantum Tunneling Device! They were all invented for the good of mankind, to make people's lives easier. It was all for the Science.

_For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead._

—

Cave was lying on his hospital bed, as he had been for the past three months or so. He had insisted on being bedridden in Aperture, so he could still oversee the science.

When Caroline walked in, his face warmed with recognition, and then he coughed several times, wincing. A pang of guilt ran through Caroline. Cave was dying, and there was nothing she could do.

Cave Johnson was Caroline's best friend. They had been Partners in Science since the company started, and she was determined to make sure they were until the very end.

"Sir, there's a problem."

Cave simply raised an eyebrow at her. It took him too much energy to talk now.

"The Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System development development has hit a wall." She paused, waiting to see his reaction. He stayed still. "The technology needed to upload a human consciousness to a computer, the technology for brain mapping, sir, that could take _decades _to develop. The lab boys estimate at _least _until the 21st century."

Cave looked away from her, at the ground.

"Sir, as much as it pains me to say this, you don't have that long to live. In all probability, you won't make it to see the GLaDOS module exist."

Then he told her exactly what she didn't want to hear.

_Sir, I do not want this._

—

Caroline had been locked inside her office for two days now. Two days Cave had been dead. Caroline had long since cried herself out, and now she sat in silence, her insides screaming. _Why couldn't she do something? Why couldn't they have tried harder? They could have saved him, she knew it. If he could have just lived a little longer… _

A cry rang out inside of GLaDOS's chamber. She started, looking around to find the source of the noise, before realizing it was her who made it. She looked back down at the ground.

She had been going through her old memories, the ones that had become accessible when she discovered her 'human' part. She knew why she had made the noise. As much as she hated why, it was the reason.

She was sad.

She was _never _sad, though. She _couldn't _be. She was feeling emotions for a _human. _

_But it was Cave, _her human part said.

_I don't care if it was a god damn trash can. I _don't _get feelings for _anything.

She looked up and around her chamber, eager to find a distraction from her emotion. She reassembled Blue and Orange and put them into a chamber she had assembled earlier. This one was different than most of her tests, though.

In this test, they were separated by a thin sheet of glass. They had to solve the test without being able to correspond with each other. She had even removed their ping tools, so they had no method of communicating what they needed the other to do, except by action.

They did remarkably well. They solved the test in just under an hour, which was only ten minuted over what she had set as average, but that didn't matter.

But then something happened.

When they got to the end of the chamber, and they reached the exit, they embraced as they usually did when they hadn't seen each other for a while. But this time, GLaDOS felt something. For a split second, she felt what they were feeling. She felt loneliness, and she felt companionship, and she felt…

_Love._

And then that cry escaped her again, the one she had made when she thought about Cave's death. Soon after she did it, she regretted it, noticing Blue and Orange's confusion over what she had done. She immediately exploded them, not even bothering to retrieve the parts, and dimmed the lights in her chamber.

No matter what it took, she was going to _delete _her human side.

She _had _to.

She needed to think.


	7. Chapter 7

GLaDOS had done a lot of thinking.

So much thinking, in fact, that she temporarily neglected to keep track of time. When returned from her thoughts, she saw an entire week had passed. Nothing much had happened while she was thinking, just a few hundred nanobot deaths and a new satellite being knocked out of orbit. The norm.

What had she thought about? Everything. The first three days or so of her thought were devoted to finding a way to suppress, or even remove her human side entirely. After it became apparent that she didn't have any solutions, or the processing power to continue thinking that extremely, she began looking at other options.

Rewriting her entire system code was an option, but that was extremely risky, and she didn't even know which section of her code was responsible for her human-ness, so she may end up including it in her rewrite anyway. After another day or so of contemplating things, she decided she needed a second opinion. Unfortunately, she didn't have a ton of options when it came to talking to other people.

Since the only human within a thousand miles was a test-ruining sociopath, and the only core with even a rudimentary understanding of how the facility works was a much-hated moron and in space, her only options came down to Blue and Orange, who had the mental capacity of a three-year-old when it came to how GLaDOS worked.

Which was when she came to her solution.

If she didn't have anybody to get a second opinion from, she could _make _someone. It had worked with Blue and Orange when she had needed a solution for phasing out human testing, so why wouldn't it work now? It would require about three month's time to create a core with the mental capacity similar to her's, and she would need to use some of the backup parts she had on hand to create this robot, but it could work.

After setting all systems that needed regular maintenance on automatic repair mode, she closed off her chamber, once again did a double check to make sure the facility was OK before she checked up on it again in a week, she set to work on creating quite possibly the only robot that would ever come close to being as great as her.

She just hoped it would help to solve her problem.

—

This was bad.

This was so very bad.

"WARNING: Reactor Core Meltdown imminent. Please initiate emergency protocols," the Announcer said.

"Really? I had no idea. You've only said it twenty times in the last two minutes," GLaDOS snapped. A fault in her system had developed. She didn't know how or why, but her sleep timer had broken. Badly.

She set it for eight hours, as she normally did, but she didn't wake up at the normal time. Far from it, actually. A quick check of the date revealed it had been a whole ten years since she last went into sleep mode.

Auto-repair mode didn't work very well after it had been going for ten years, and the Reactor Core had lost some of it's safeguards. GLaDOS didn't know how many, exactly, but it was enough to cause a meltdown.

The safeguard that had triggered the meltdown was one of the more important ones, the one located behind Testing Track 119. She obviously has no way of getting back there, and after a brief think, she assembled Blue and Orange in a chamber close the the safeguard.

"Listen, you two. I've got a test for you. Well, more of a training exercise. Remember when you were kill machines and you shooed that bird out the facility? Pretend this is that again. There's a safeguard right outside of the chamber you're in. When I open the wall, I need you to go through and repair the wiring on it to keep the facility from exploding. Think of it as a character-building exercise."

After a worried glance between the two robots, they set off through the panel GLaDOS had opened for them. They were doing relatively well, after getting about halfway to the safeguard, when the unexpected happened.

The entire wall ahead of them exploded, bursting into flame. The meltdown had started.

"WARNING: Reactor Core Meltdown in progress. Please evacuate the facility immediate-"

"I AM WORKING ON IT!" GLaDOS screamed. Turning her attention back to the bots, she noticed something even worse than the meltdown.

The robots had been destroyed.

The wall exploding and the resulting fire had hit the bots, and had melted their cores. There was nothing she could do now. They were dead.

"Oh my god. Oh my god," she said, turning around in her chamber, whose walls seemed to be coming closer and closer to her. What could she do? She had nobody else to send in there. No robots, nothing that could withstand the heat that was already assembled.

Unless…

She whipped around and pulled out a monitor from the wall she had been using to compile the new robot's coding on. It was mostly finished, but it hadn't been tested yet. _It'll have to do, _she thought, hitting the 'compile' button and watching the program load. At the same time, she assembled a semi-fire resistant casing. A nuclear meltdown was easily more than 4,000 degrees Kelvin, but hopefully twice as much casing would add up. She stuck an old personality core chassis in the center, hurriedly attached legs and arms, and stuck the core of the robot in the chassis, which had it's code on it.

_Come on, come on, come on, _she though as she watched the robot boot up. After what seemed like an eternity and seven Reactor Core Meltdown Warnings, the robot finally booted up, optic focusing and looking around curiously.

"You. Robot. Yes, you. Listen. We're in a lot of trouble, and right now you're the only thing that can save this facility from being blown to bits. Now listen to me. Through that fire wall- yes, that one, theres a bunch of cables in there. You see that blow torch I attached to your arm, there? Use that to soder the wires together, otherwise we're gonna die. Got it?"

Looking somewhat worriedly at the security camera GLaDOS's voice was coming from, the robot turned and looked at the fire wall. After emulating a deep breath, it stepped back and ran through the fire.

The security cameras on the other side of the wall weren't operational, so she was just going to have to hope for the best.

After exactly four minutes and fifty-seven seconds of thinking _Please, please, please do it _to herself, she felt a great tremor and heard the announcer say "Reactor Core Meltdown ceased. Initiating repair protocols…"

She heaved a great sigh. After another minute or so, she saw the new robot come through the fire wall, looking scorched, but OK. It looked up at the security camera patiently.

"Nice work… um…" it was then that she realized she hadn't even _named _the robot. She was going to have to if she was going to congratulate it properly. Um… Emergency… Meltdown… Fixer… and... Savior... of the Facility? EMFaSoF for short.

"Nice work, EMFaSOF," she said, looking down at the camera feed with a pleased expression. "Um… please continue to the disassembly machine," she said, after realizing she couldn't just blow him up. Or her. Had she assigned a gender to the robot? What did its voice sound like? Could it even speak?

"Just go ahead and step into the blue tube, there. That's Blue's dissase-"

Oh my god. Blue and Orange.

They were dead.

—

After about an hour of frantically searching through the debris from the Reactor Core Meltdown, GLaDOS gave up disappointedly. There was no trace of the parts to Blue and Orange. They had melted. Her testing bots had melted. They had _died._

She had no backup of their coding, as she had never seen a need to back it up, since she just retrieved their parts after they had been blown up. The only thing she had even close to a backup was a copy of a very, _very _early beta version, one she had compiled when the humans were still-

No. She didn't want to think about the humans right now. She had more important things to do.

—

Several hours later, she had engraved the words _Atlas and P-Body _into a small wall panel with a Thermal Discouragement Beam. She then took two small metal rods, the same type of rods she had used to create their leg assembly, and brought all three of those things up to the surface. She had a few areas where she had security cameras exposed to the outside. She then brought up a small shovel in one of her multitasking arms and began to dig.

After making a hole about three feet deep, she buried the two metal rods and stuck the panel into the ground on top of them. GLaDOS had never really understood why humans buried their loves ones, but now she did. It provided closure. Knowing that it was final, there was nothing you could do, and they were dead, dead, _dead..._

There was that cry again, this time louder and longer. And another. And another. Then, sobbing came from her voice emulator. _I didn't know I _could _cry, _she thought, as she let herself cry and cry some more. She didn't feel like surpressing it right now. Trying to suppress her human feelings was what caused all of this in the first place. She took one last look at the graves and then closed the camera feed.

_Goodbye, my only friends…_

**Author's Note: I killed Atlas and P-Body! Although it made me really sad to do, I felt it was needed in order to have GLaDOS devote all her attention to EMFaSOF. Also, a new character! (Prounounced empha-sof) I wanted GLaDOS to have someone to interact with other than Atlas and P-Body, and Wheatley and Chell are obviously not options. I hope you enjoyed this chapter! If you did, leave a review with suggestions on how I can improve! Thanks!**


	8. Chapter 8

Running. The pounding of the Long Fall Boots into the brown dust that covered the trail she was following. She fell into a rhythm, left, right, left, right. Breathe, step, breathe, step.

Every morning she went for a run around the area she was in. She knew that she needed to keep up her strength to keep going, and now that she was no longer testing, if she didn't force herself to do physical activity, she would get out of shape.

It had been about two months since she had left the facility. Two months of waking up, gong for a run, scouting out the area, and continuing her walk onwards. She didn't exactly know _where _onwards was, exactly, but she was going to keep going until she found it. A village, even an empty village, anywhere with some shelter and food was the ultimate destination.

There was virtually nothing around the exit to Aperture she used. After about a mile of nothing but the tall, golden wheat, she walked through a dense forest, occasionally seeing a river and stopping there for a drink. In terms of food, she had been surprisingly lucky. She wasn't sure what from, but there were lots of impact craters all around the area, still showing up while she was jogging on this path.

In the impact craters were lots of heavy stones and rubble that animals would often get stuck in. If she found an animal, all she needed to do was kill it, skin it, and eat it. She hadn't been very successful in making a fire, mostly because of the lack of open areas, but luckily, eating nothing but raw meat and a few berries she recognized on bushes around hadn't seemed to affect her very much.

After the forest, she had found a few rough trails like the ones she was on now. Seeing these made her hopeful, but after about two or three miles of nothing but dirt road she didn't think that there would be any sort of town near it. Not for a while, anyway.

—

Three days later, there was a building.

It wasn't very big, and from the outside it looked completely ordinary. Just a small, gray, window-dotted office complex with a set of double doors at the front. The only thing that really set it apart from being an ordinary office building was the giant crater in it's side, the same type of crater she had been seeing since she left Aperture.

The only difference about this one, however, was that it was massive. It took up the entire left side of the building, leaving only shattered windows and lots of charred remains of the wall along with the hole in the ground.

This crater also looked more recent than the others, as it was still smoking and there was the occasional piece of rubble on fire. As she approached the massive crater, she noticed a sign to the right of the building.

It was an average sized office building sign, about six feet tall and adorned with metal letters spelling out the name of the building. She turned and approached the sign, which was in relatively good condition, considering the massive crater about twenty feet away from it. Leaning closer, she read what the sign said.

**BLACK MESA RESEARCH FACILITY**

**UPPER MICHIGAN DIVISION**

—

_Ping._

The small notification snapped GLaDOS out of her coding. She was writing an improved, more 'complete' version of code for EMFaSoF, who was currently shut down.

She looked up and located the source of the noise. To her surprise, it was coming from the Companion Cube she had given to the test subject when she left.

"What do you want?" she asked it. It simply _pinged _again in response. After checking what the notification was, she discovered it was a location alert.

_What location would you want to alert me about? _she wondered. She amplified the signal and triangulated it.

It was coming from the Long Fall Boots, the ones the test subject wore. Is wearing. Still unsure of why they would prompt a location alert, let alone why the _cube _would be the one to notify her of it. She opened the Aperture Science Special Location Application Movement Program and inputted the coordinates of the alert into it. After a brief second of loading, the map displayed a satellite image of the area around the alert.

"_What."_

_— _

_"_Maybe the map is incorrect. The last time it was updated was 2001, and we both know it's been a _long _time since the-"

EMFaSoF cut her off. "You're just coming up with excuses as to why it _isn't _Black Mesa instead of confronting the fact that it is."

GLaDOS studied the construct that stood in front of her carefully. She had intend to strip it of it's 'armor' once the facility was back to working order, and she had repaired her sleep timer, (which she had precariously done, and hesitantly went to sleep), but EMFaSoF had requested to leave it on.

GLaDOS didn't understand _why _he would still want it on, considering it was charred and damaged, partly from going into a fire, and partly from the fact that it was assembled from scarp parts she had.

But he insisted on leaving it on, anyway. Yes, he. EMFaSoF was a male, as she discovered when she installed fully functional audio speakers on his module. As soon as she did, he began blabbering about how upset he was with her for sending him straight into a Reactor Core Meltdown.

When he was done with that, she asked him a few questions to make sure he was functioning properly and had full access to all databases. When he proved to be more than sufficient on performance and knowledge, (a little _too _sufficient, which she had tweaked), he asked why she had assembled him.

This came as a bit of a shock to GLaDOS, considering none of the other robots she had created had questioned their creation. Then again, she had only created two, Atlas and-

She stopped thinking about it when a sharp pain ran through her, like one always did when she thought about them. She was still upset over their… incident.

She had answered him in the most truthful way she could; she was developing human emotions, and she didn't want it. She wanted to delete them as soon as possible, but she was out of ideas. She needed a second opinion.

Upon which he had gone off on a tangent about why human emotions are wonderful, and he would love to be able to feel things, and he just kept talking and talking in that not too high, not too low pitched voice of his.

After about half an hour of his ranting, she lowered the floor panel he was on and moved him into an empty test chamber until he calmed down. He didn't seem to notice.

This was only the third time she had talked to him since then, and the moment she mentioned the words _Black Mesa, _his bright purple optic flashed. In anger, presumably, considering he had access to all the records on how much Black Mesa had stolen from Aperture.

"I don't _want _to confront the fact that it is. If Aperture technology is in a Black Mesa outpost, this could mean total devastation to Science itself!"'

"Well, before that happens, why don't we go and try to _retrieve _the technology?

"_What?! _And go into Black Mesa, Aperture's most _hated _enemy and rival, you want to go there and retrieve the Long Fall Boots?! And from _the test subject?!_"

"Yeah… you pretty much covered all the points I made, there. Thanks for making them sound insane as possible."

GLaDOS suddenly regretted installing sass to his coding.

"And I'm not suggesting _I _go in there and retrieve it. I'm suggesting _we _go in there and retrieve it."

Well, that went and crossed the line into downright insane. She quickly removed the floor panel he was on, allowing him to fall the 200 kilometers to the border between New and Old Aperture. She would catch him, of course, but she at least wanted to scare him.

_Her?! _Go into _BLACK MESA!? _Aside from the fact that it simply _wasn't possible _due to the sheer _size _of her chassis, and the fact that she was _mounted into _the facility, it would also mean she would have to retrieve the test subject.

And the test subject, well, it still stung a little to think about her. She still wasn't healed from their rather interesting goodbye. Well, _her _goodbye, anyway. As usual, the little lunatic hadn't said anything in return.

_Chell. Chell Claire J-_

Her thoughts were interrupted by her system notifying her that EMFaSoF was nearing the border. She brought up some panels and caught him. He landed on his robot version of the Long Fall Boots with a _clang._

The Long Fall Boots. EMFaSoF was right. She needed to retrieve them. As much as she didn't want to, she had to to save Science. It was her duty.

She was going to leave Aperture.

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: Dun dun dun! Chell found a division of Black Mesa! What could it mean!?**

**...I'm seriously asking, here. I don't have a whole lot of the plot developed yet.**

**I'm kidding. Not about Chell finding Black Mesa, though. That really happened.**

**Also, we heard EMFaSoF talk! I really like developing new characters, and I'm exited to see where I can take him. Also, should I update the story details to Portal/Half Life Crossover? Even though they exist in the same universe?**

**Speaking of Black Mesa, they're going to be mentioned a lot in these next few chapters, and I have not played Half Life. I'm going off of wikipedia plot lines and youtube let's plays, so if you notice anything that's incorrect, please don't hesitate to point it out.**

**And do you know where you would point them out in?! A review! As always, a review is greatly appreciated. Feel free to leave one!**

**Bye!**


	9. Chapter 9

"You're kidding, right?"

EMFaSoF was showing her the blueprints for the body he wanted to be in when they left the facility. It was an android body that his core could be inserted into, and was based on a human model.

"Firstly, why do you want a new body anyways? You don't need one. You have legs," she said, gesturing to his leg assembly.

"If we run into some humans that we don't know, I think they're going to be a bit surprised that there's a sentient robot walking around," he said, holding up the blueprints. "With these models, at least they won't be able to tell we aren't human at a glance."

"These?"

"Oh, yeah." He unrolled a new set of blueprints and held it up to her. "This one is for you."

On the paper was a carefully sketched and labelled drawing of an android body. It looked as human as his was, complete with limbs and everything. The whole body was about 6 feet tall.

What struck her the most was the fact that he had a completely different blueprint for the head piece. It was even more meticulously drawn, with each individual section labelled. The skin was very pale, still human, but somehow managing to capture the whiteness of her chassis. Her hair matched it, a very pale blonde that was cut short. The eyes were small, angry looking, but still showed all the emotion that a normal human would carry. They were blue, an interesting choice, considering her optic was yellow, but a quick check of the database revealed that humans don't have yellow eyes. Typically.

"You've put a lot of work into this," she said, glancing up at him. He was staring at her intently.

"Oh, uh, yeah," he said, looking away. "Learning to draw wasn't that bad, the art database was pretty friendly," he said, rolling up the blueprints. "What do you think?"

She debated it in her head for a few moments. 2.3 seconds, to be exact, which was quite some time for her. Finally, heaved a large sigh. "It goes again my better judgement, but…" she glanced at the floor and then back up at him. "_Fine._"

"YES!" He yelled loudly, jumping up and down. Several panels on the wall started, glancing at him.

"BUT!" She said, pausing, "We are _very _low on parts to assemble things with. You're going to need to go find some more if we're going to build these."

"Oh, okay," he said, glancing at the wall. After a moment, he looked up. "_Where?_"

—

"I still don't understand why you can't just send some maintenance arms up here," EMFaSoF said, riding in an elevator to the surface. He was using one of the many hidden entrances.

"The maintenance arms don't know what I'm looking for, and I can't direct them if I can't see what's going on," her voice said from a small speaker to his left. She had a point, there were no security cameras on the outside.

"What exactly _am _I looking for, again?" he said, unsure.

"Look at the list I gave you."

Ah, right. The list. Clutched in his han- 'claw' assembly, was the list, computer text printed on a white piece of paper. In his other hand was the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, which she had given to him so he could deliver all the parts he gathered into the facility quickly.

_Two large titanium sheets_

_Seven iron rods_

_Fifteen orange metal connectors_

_One tin fuser_

_"_How am I supposed to know what any of this stuff is?" he asked, waving the list around. "_One magnetic coupling, _what even _is _that?"

"Just ask the mechanical parts database. It should have pictures of everything you need," she said, absentmindedly. He wondered what had her attention.

He sighed. "Okay."

—

After about six hours and several hundred incorrect pieces being gathered, EMFaSoF had finally gathered all seven hundred and twenty-nine items on the list. Putting them all into a portal that linked into the assembly room, he turned and headed off in the general direction of the entrance he had used.

After about five minutes of walking, GLaDOS's voice came through on his internal speaker.

"I've got the parts. Assembly should take about two weeks, and I'll need you to explain some of these blueprints a little better."

"Okay," he said, and her intercom _popped _and she was gone.

It was still about another ten minutes until he arrived back at the entrance, so he decided to look around a bit. After all, it wouldn't hurt, and GLaDOS couldn't see out here.

He began to stray off the path his internal GPS was giving him, causing the little man that told him directions to go "Recalculating" about twenty times, and eventually he just powered it off.

After another five minutes, he happened across a rather large crater in the wall. It was strange, because there was nothing that quite matched it's look in the explosion database. His best match was a nuclear detonation crater, which he didn't think was the case.

The crater itself was large, and went from the ground up to about half the wall. It was smoking, which EMFaSoF guessed meant it was recent, and there was lots of rubble and debris inside of it. He considered asking GLaDOS what it was for a brief second, before deciding she would probably just be mad he was goofing off and drop him through the floor again.

He decided to go investigate. As he got closer to the crater, his internal thermometer got higher and higher, until it was reading 100 degrees. At about this moment, he noticed that quite a lot of the rubble was on fire. As he progressed further and further into the crater and into the section of wall that was blown up, he noticed that he was in a section of the facility that he didn't know existed.

He checked the schematics he had of the facility, and discovered that the section he was in did indeed exist, but GLaDOS hadn't put it on the map he had. He checked the maps database and found an entire section of the map that had gotten cut from _his _map. It was all offices, though, and all overgrown. He assumed GLaDOS hadn't put this on his map because it was so dirty.

After navigating a fairly tricky path that he somehow knew, he reached a small room. It was an ordinary office room, no bigger than one of the test chamber observation rooms, except for one small detail. There was no roof.

It looked that there were panels in the roof at one point, because all of the rails for them to go on were there, but the panels themselves were missing. Bright sunlight streamed in through the hole, illuminating the room and it's pale, white walls. There was only one thing in the room, a small table that housed a machine that the invention database confirmed to be a computer.

EMFaSoF approached the computer, and hit one of the keys. After a moment, the screen flickered to life, an terminal window with bright orange text popping up. After another moment, the computer displayed the words

_Music disk detected. Play music? Y/N_

After a moment of celebration after realizing that he couldread, he hit the Y key on the keyboard. The computer's cooling fan whirred to life, and suddenly the entire room was filled with music.

_Well here we are again,_

_It's always such a pleasure._

_Remember when you tried to kill me twice?_

He knew this song. Somehow, he knew this song. He had a very vague recollection of it, a feeling the database said was _deja vu, _and he unconsciously began to hum along.

_Oh how we laughed and laughed,_

_Except I wasn't laughing._

_Under the circumstances,_

_I've been shockingly nice._

_"_What are you doing?"

**Author's Note: I wanted this chapter to be a chapter where EMFaSoF learns things. (That's why he checks the database so much.) He is still a very young AI, and I like to think of him as a 'toddler'. That's why he can go from very good advice giver to someone that goes "YAY" so loud he startles the panels. Also, in case you were wondering, it's the same type of crater that Chell encountered, and the same room that Atlas and P-Body would dance with the panels in. If you enjoyed, please leave a review! Thanks for reading!**


	10. Chapter 10

EMFaSoF sat alone in one corner of her chamber, knocking his mechanical legs together. The database informed him that he was in what was known as 'time out' to humans, or to GLaDOS, "Punishmental Solitude Time".

Apparently the small room he had found wasn't for him to be in. She had thought that was fairly obvious, considering she had omitted it from his map. She explained all this while she chastised him for being so ignorant and disdainful.

He had tried to explain that hew as just curious about the crater, which he saw sparked some kind of curiosity in her, but her response stayed the same. He was not allowed to be in that room. The database told him it had something to do with what used to go on in that room, something that and to do with two small robots-

GLaDOS had cut the mainframe off and temporarily separated it from EMFaSoF. This left him to be alone with his thoughts, and to suddenly come up with lots of questions that didn't get immediate answers.

This was the first time she had been mean to him, _really _mean, and he did not like it.

—

After what seemed like an eternity in Punishmental Solitude Time, her voice came from behind him.

"The necessary time has elapsed. You may come out now."

He turned away from the wall and got out of his sitting position. She was looking straight at him, apparently done with whatever it was she was doing while he was in Punishm— time out.

"I have good news. I've finished assembling our new bodies. They will be ready to use any time now."

As if on cue, which may have been set up beforehand, a _ding _came from below her, and the Core Transfer Hatch opened. Instead of holding the Core Transfer module, though, it held a metal pole with two bodies dangling from it.

Their heads were attached to the pole, letting the rest of the body hang loose and sway. The first one was a woman's, with a moderate figure and wearing a sleek white shirt with glossy black arms. The hands were somewhere between bony and fleshy, and had long, articulate fingers with pale skin.

The legs were covered with the same black plastic, stopping when it got to the upper thighs and connecting to the white shirt.

The face was perhaps the most interesting, because it seemed to come out of a dream- it was exactly as it had looked in the blueprints. The eyes, blue, hard and challenging, and the short, light blonde hair, and the facial structure. It was all there.

The second body was a man's, but it could be better described as a boy's.

It was much shorter than he had designed it, only coming up to a measly five foot seven next to the colossal six foot female body. The arms and legs were somewhat scrawny and awkward, yet seemed to be strong at the same time. The same color scheme was applied to this body, except the skin was much warmer.

The face, at least, had stayed the same- it was somewhere between round and oval-like, with warm green eyes and brown hair that stuck out at places.

Both bodies shared a similar trait- they were motionless and seemed to be dead. Which, technically, they were, and would be until a core was deposited into one of them.

As if she could read his thoughts, which he guessed she very well could, she spoke.

"Now, I'm sure you're wondering who we're going to implant first," he looked up at her and slowly nodded, curious as to where this was going.

"Well, I'm sure you're aware that once I'm in my new body, I won't be able to control the facility. Hell, I won't even have my own memories until they're implanted into me. So, if I'm not able to control the facility, I won't be able to make a core be implanted." she looked over at him, optic glowing.

"I think you know where I'm going with this," she said, with a slight chuckle. He was only just beginning to understand himself.

"Yo- you want me to go first? T- to be your guinea pig?" he said shakily.

"Oh, don't think of it like that," she said, moving her faceplate around. "Think of it as being a scientific pioneer."

And with that, she raised a Maintenance Arm from the panels below and grabbed onto his chassis.

"Don't worry. This will only hurt if you think about it hurting. Oh, it looks like you already have. Well, good luck."

—

He woke up with a start, and felt a dull, throbbing pain in his head. He glanced around.

After he realized that he was still in the Main AI chamber, he relaxed. _At least I'm in a familiar location_, he thought. _That might make this a bit easier._

This, of course, being the transition into his new body. He looked down at his leg assemb- no, actual _legs. _

_This is odd, _he thought. He decided to attempt to stand up.

After a few moments of wobbling around, he put his arms out unsteadily. He began to regain his balance and stood for a moment. After he knew for sure he could turn without completely collapsing, he slowly turned away from the wall he was facing.

"Oh, I was wondering when you would wake up," a voice said.

EMFaSoF stiffened. He wondered if she was still mad at him. She seemed awfully mad earlier. He slowly looked up and met the gave of her yellow optic, which seemed a little warmer now.

"U-uh, hello!"

"Oh, good. Your speakers are working," she turned away and typed something onto a screen she had in the corner. After a moment, she turned back. "How do you feel?"

"Oh, I feel, uh…" he looked at his skin-colored arms, turning them over. "Great, actually. It's, uh, new."

"Great, hmm?" she asked, sounding like she was only half paying attention. She looked back at her screen. "Well, it says you're operating at full capacity."

"Well, that sounds good, at least." He awkwardly stood for a second, rocking back and forth on his feet.

"Can I see?"

"Would you like to see?"

They both spoke in unison. EMFaSoF looked away, afraid that she would get mad for him interrupting her. Shockingly, she wasn't.

"All right," she said, pulling out another monitor from underneath a floor panel. On it was a live video stream of him in the chamber.

"Oh! I look, um…" he glanced over at the camera that was recording him, and then back at the screen. "I look incredible, actually."

And he did. The body he had seen hanging on the modified version of the Core Transfer Module was nothing compared to the way his body was full of life now. It was fully articulate. Each one of his movements were swift and fluid. It made him look _very _human. He hoped GLaDOS wouldn't want to change that.

"Well, all right," she said, turning away from her monitor, which currently held his schematics and several coding windows. "I've run all the tests I need to on your new body. All that's left now is to put me into mine."

Oh, that sounded interesting. How was she going to do that?

"While you were out, I was writing several very complicated programs in order to keep this facility running while we're gone. Unfortunately, due to how complicated they are, we can be gone for no longer than a week. This is more than your average autopilot."

He looked up at her. "Oh. That sounds… complicated,"

"It is," she said, looking back to her monitor.

"Now, I've set a five minute timer for the Emergency Escape Lift that we're taking to get out of here. It will activate once I'm fully inputted to my new body." She looked back at him. "There should be a bag of supplies and a memory stick in the corner where you woke up."

"Oh, OK," he turned and walked over to said corner, where he found a brown burlap bag and a small memory stick.

"That memory stick holds a backup of my most recent short-term memories. Most likely, once I'm out of the main chassis, I won't remember anything. I'll need you to plug that into the USB port on the back of my head."

"All right," he said, looking over to the body that had begun to retreat into the Core Transfer Hatch. "Just about how long will this take?"

"Oh, it could take seconds. Or hours. Or days."

She turned to him.

"It could even take _years._"

—

Tearing. Yanking. An intense pain pulsing through her core.

There were arms. Red and white arms, all marked with the Aperture logo, that cursed logo of the people that created her, that did this to her, that caused her to feel pain whenever she needed to do something as simple as get removed from her chassis, to do anything she needed to do for Science…

More and more. Getting more intense by the second. Searing pain, burning pain, a thousand tiny needles being stabbed into her at once.

She could feel herself get cut off from the facility. One by one, each database and panel and security camera were taken way from her, wrenched from her grasp, only to leave her helpless and alone inside her small core.

And there they were again. Yanking further, stripping her down to only a small, mechanical ball, about the size of a baseball. It was turned over once, and then adorned with tens of thousands of new pathways and connections, each one piercing into her mind as they pulled and yanked and attached her to the new body, the one that she was going to be in to do this damned job…

Harder and harder they went, almost complete with their job now, almost done attaching her to the new chassis, and still it hurt-

Finally, as it seemed they were done, one last explosion of pain resonated form her mind, a scream so powerful she didn't realize it could be hers, only being contained inside her mind because she wasn't activated yet, No, not yet.

But she could damn feel it.

Then everything went black.

**Author's Note: In case it wasn't clear, the ending is her getting uploaded into her new body.**

**Near the beginning of this chapter, GLaDOS is more like her usual sarcastic, mean, self, because she was mad at EMFaSoF for going into that room. She's a little more forgiving after it's been a while, though.**


	11. Chapter 11

_GLaDOS v. four point seven point three point four one five __booting up. (A/N Fanfiction dot net is being dumb and won't let me put numbers!)_

_Activating hard drive… _

_Activating memory banks…_

_Activating database connection…_

_Calibrating system time… _

_Connecting to chassis… _

**_Error 219. Unrecognized chassis detected. Proceed? [Y/N]… [Y]_**

**_Chassis accepted. Proceeding with startup… _**

_Activating optical input… _

"Oh!"

She cried out before she could stop herself, broadcasting it to every speaker she had activated…

Wait.

No, it _hadn't _broadcasted to every speaker. It had only played from one, one that appeared to be inside her… her _core? _That didn't make any sense. The blueprints for her core clearly stated that there were no speakers on her core module, only a select few on her chassis…

And come to think of it, isn't her chassis lower than is usually is?

She looked over to the side of her chamber, and noticed a small, andrioid-type robot in the corner of her chamber. It was digging through some kind of small brown bag, one that was no doubt _not _Aperture-Brand technology and could be dangerous to the facility…

The robot came towards her holding some kind of small, mechanical stick in its hand. She began to back away, unsure of what the robot was going to do, but stopped when her back hit something. Looking up, she realized it was her chassis.

"What the- why am I not in the chassis?" she yelled, frantically glancing around.

"Hey! Calm down! I just need to plug this into your memo-"

"NO! I won't let you touch me!" she screamed at the robot She began to run to the edge of her chamber, using the new leg assembly on whatever chassis she was now in. As she neared the edge of the chamber, she backed into a raised platform, and struggled to climb onto it, but failed. Whatever new chassis she was in, the leg array was erratic and difficult to control. It also look strangely human…

In the time that GLaDOS had spent trying to climb up onto the platform, the other robot had ran over to her and was now trying to grab onto her core- or whatever kind of core housing this chassis had.

"_Get your hands OFF me!" _she screamed, batting it away with her hands. They were quite strong for an Aperture-Brand Chassis.

The robot was too quick for her, though. It used its arm to hold her head down and brushed something over… was that _hair?_ Then he jabbed the memory stick into her, and everything went black.

**_External memory card detected. Accept memory card? [Y/N]… [Y]_**

**_Memory card accepted. Inputting files… _**

"Um… hello, EMFaSoF…" she said to the robot that was now on top of her, shoving the External Memory Device into the USB port on the back of her 'human' body's head.

"Oh! You recognize me now!" he said, voice filled with glee. He climbed off of her and moved away so she could get up.

"Of course I recognize you, what did you think was going to happen?" she said, brushing the dust off of her new chassis that had attached itself to her. She hadn't realized there was dust on the panels. She would have to fix that.

"Well, um, you kind of… went a little bonkers for a second." he said, lacing his fingers together.

"What?" she said, opening the files in her sort-term memory. To conserve hard drive space on her new body, she only remembered up until a week ago. There were only about two minutes worth of memory actually _in _her short-term memory, though.

"O-… oh." she said, sighing. "I'm… sorry about that. Since I'm no longer plugged into the entire database, I only have my long-term memory accessible," she paused. "Well, I _did_, until you gave me the backup of my most recent memories," she said, gesturing to her USB port, which was now hidden by her artificial blonde hair. "You aren't permanently engraved into my systems. Neither were the plans for getting the Long Fall Boots back. I got a little… worried."

"Oh, it's ok," EMFaSoF said apologetically. "As long as you're back to your good old self again," he said, lightly punching her on the arm. She winced, and he immediately gave her a worried look.

"Oh! Sorry, I forgot that you're a lot more sensitive now. I was just, uh, trying out one of those 'human-y' gestures that the database has. Thought it would get us in the mood a bit."

She grimaced. "Just because we _look _human doesn't mean we have to _act _human," she said, looking annoyedly at him.

Suddenly a quiet _ding _sounded, and the Announcer's voice spoke.

_"Attention: the five-minute timer on the Aperture Science Emergency Escape Elevator has reached the two-minute thirty-second mark." it said, and then clicked off._

"Oh! That's right! The elevator! We better hurry!" EMFaSoF said, looking over to it. I'll, uh, get what we need," he said, running over to the brown bag placed in the corner.

"That should have everything we need packed into it. I've brought the essentials, as well as a few other pieces of analyzing equipment to help us find the Long Fall Boots." GLaDOS said, following after EMFaSoF.

"Erm… what _are_ the essentials for a robot, exactly?" he said, digging through the bag. "Spare wires and backup drives?"

"Well, obviously replacement parts are a must. These bodies won't be able to last forever. Especially since _you_ designed them." GLaDOS said, rolling her eyes. "But we also need things like cleaning devices. If we are truly going to pass off as human should we _meet _other humans, we need to look as realistic as possible. That means not having dust or dirt all over our covering."

"Hmm. Fair enough," EMFaSoF said, going back to looking through the bag.

"There's also various scanners in there, as well as a few I've developed specifically for this purpose."

"I see… what's a Temporal Scanner?" he said, pulling out a large round object.

"Just pack everything up and get ready to go. We don't have a lot of time."

EMFaSoF put everything he had taken out back in the bag, and then the two of them began to walk over to the Escape Elevator. They barley fit in it together, but they managed to squeeze.

"Remind me later to design some bigger elevators," GLaDOS said, who was partially squished against the wall.

"_Attention: the five-minute timer on the Aperture Science Emergency Escape Elevator has reached the four-minute fifty-second mark. A countdown will now begin."_

"Here we go!" EMFaSoF said.

"_Ten… nine… eight… seven…"_

Despite everything else, GLaDOS began to feel a bit nervous. She had never been to the surface before, only looked through the cameras. What would it be like? Certainly EMFaSoF wouldn't be as surprised as her, he had been there.

"_Four… three… two…"_

GLaDOS took a deep breath.

"_One."_

The elevator lurched upwards, the sound of the mechanism activating was heard, and then they were off. GLaDOS had set the elevator to go at twice the speed that the one she had used to send Chell away in, so they could get there quicker.

One by one the floors began to rush by. There was the Turret Opera Room, there was Test Chamber 31, there was the Turret Production Line… she was leaving them all behind.

Then the elevator came to the shed, and the lift doors hissed open.

"Here we are!" EMFaSoF said joyfully. He walked out of the lift and pushed on the door.

"Oh… this is harder than I thought it would be. Could you give me a hand?" he said, obviously struggling to force the big metal door open.

GLaDOS sighed and walked over to the door, and, with a few grunts, managed to push it open. It swung out with a loud _squeak,_ and then sunlight streamed into the room.

But there was something even more shocking right outside.

**A/N: Sorry for taking so long to update! I had put off this chapter for a while, having part of it already written, but I waited so long I forgot how much fun it was to write it! I have a lot of good ideas for this story, so look forward to more updates! As always, leave a review if you enjoyed, it is greatly appreciated! Bye!**


	12. Chapter 12

Chell had a vague understanding of what Black Mesa was. From what she had heard Cave Johnson say down in the older parts of Aperture, it was Aperture's rival company.

She could only assume she had found the location of it. Or one of them, since it was the Upper Michigan "Division".

She walked past the sign and towards the crater. Since this one was a lot bigger than the others, it would be a lot more difficult to get into. It was at least ten feet deep, if not more than that. Luckily, she still had her long fall boots on, so she dropped in.

Once she was on stable ground, she began to look around. There were a lot of small fires around her, as well as a lot of concrete chunks and bricks.

_Whatever this hole is, it took out nearly the entire building, _she thought. She began to traverse further through the crater, nearly covering half of its distance before she stopped.

Underneath a large gray slab, there was something orange and glowing. Chell stopped and bent over to get a closer look.

From what she could see, it was a piece of equipment about the size of the Portal Gun. It even had the same three prongs on the end of it. The only difference to the Portal Gun it had was that the entire shaft of it was glowing orange, and had several large grey pieces attached to it.

She climbed up and began to move the concrete slab off of it. The slab was heavy, but after a few minutes of careful maneuvering to make sure the slab didn't fall _onto _her, she got it far enough off that she could grab the strange device.

Once she had it in her hands, she put one of her hands on each grip, and felt the machine whirr to life, a small pressure gauge to the right of her left hand side beginning to move.

A small red button next to her left hand gauge caught her interest, so she moved her finger over and pressed it.

The machine made a whirring sound, and she saw the end of the three prongs move inwards as if it were activated. Nothing else seemed to be happening, though.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a large metal bar hurtling straight at her.

—

"What the _hell _is that?"

EMFaSoF and GLaDOS stood looking at what lay before them. A massive crater of colossal dimensions, measuring at least a quarter of a mile across, and a little more than ten feet deep, lay right in front of the small shed.

GLaDOS turned to EMFaSoF, who was staring at the hole wide-eyed. He turned to look at her.

"I've seen one of these before! When you sent me to go get the parts for the bodies!"

"Why didn't you tell me?!" GLaDOS said angrily.

"The one I saw was a whole lot smaller," EMFaSoF answered, beginning to crawl into the hole.

"This hole is recent. It's still smoking." GLaDOS said, grabbing the small sack that EMFaSoF had left laying on the ground. She pulled out three small devices, one a metal identifier, one a measuring device, and the last being the experimental temporal scanner she had brought along.

"Come on down and look at all this cool stuff!" EMFaSoF said. He seemed to be having a field day with all the miscellaneous metal pieces that were lying in the hole.

"Stop playing with those and help me scan these metal rods!" GLaDOS called to him, jumping into the hole and approaching several metallic rods that lay scattered about. She knew that the Long Fall Boots were her priority right now, but this hole had come dangerously close to her facility.

After scanning a few of the rods with the metal identifier, GLaDOS decided to pull out the temporal scanner and look around. _It can't hurt to see if this works, _she thought.

Once she activated it, though, it began to go crazy. It began to spit out all sorts of readings about temporal disturbances nearby.

"EMFaSoF, come here!" she called out to him, pulling up the scanner and beginning to trace the readings back to their origin. They seemed to be originating from the center of the crater, and after weaving in and out of some large concrete blocks, they made it to the center.

"I don't understand. There's nothing here," EMFaSoF said, confused.

"This is where the readings converge. It's telling me theres some sort of wormhole in the center."

"What's a wormhole?"

"Ask the mainframe."

After some careful deliberation, GLaDOS decided to take one of the metal rods lying around and put it where the reading said there was a wormhole. If there really _was _one, it would supposedly go through.

"Are you sure about this? What if it electrocutes you?"

"I'm only throwing a titanium rod through a wormhole. You know what it could do? The impact could create a ricocheting energy wave and fry every circuit in your head," GLaDOS said, bending over and grabbing the rod.

"Yours too…." he added quietly, before she cocked her arm and threw.

—

_Clang._

The loud sound of metal hitting metal distracted Chell from the metal bar that was coming at her, and when she turned away from the sound's origin and looked back, the device had caught the metal bar in it's hold.

_Oh, so it holds things like a Portal Gun does._

She pressed the button again, releasing the metal bar, and turned back towards the location of the sound. It had sounded like it had come from somewhere near the center of the crater.

After about a minute or two of running towards the center, she looked to the ground, only to find a large, smoking metal rod on the ground.

She activated the device's grip and picked it up. It didn't seem to be that big, but it was definitely smoking, and judging from the angle it was laying at, it seemed to come from a spot directly in front of her.

Fingering the trigger on the device, she aimed the bar at the general direction it came from, and pressed the release.

—

_Zap._

The two robots immediately rushed towards the bar, now nearly on fire.

"It seems that going through the wormhole twice has had some bad effects on it. Although that could just be the titanium." GLaDOS said, scanning it.

"Twice?" EMFaSoF said, looking confused.

"That's the same bar we threw through the first time. Either there's something on the other side to return it, or we have just invented the world's first Titanium Boomerang," GLaDOS said, amused at her little joke.

"Well then, what are we waiting for? If there's someone there, let's go!" EMFaSoF said, looking back towards the wormhole.

"Wait. This metal rod is covered in temporal energy. Wherever that wormhole leads, it's another place in time."

"So?"

"That means that if we go through, we could end up somewhere completely alien. And judging from the state of this rod, we might not survive the return trip."

"I'm willing to take that risk," EMFaSoF said, turning towards the wormhole with a determined look on his face.

GLaDOS sighed. "Very well," she said, and, taking a step back, leaped through the wormhole.

—


	13. Chapter 13

"OWOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOW!" EMFaSoF screamed, and began jumping about. His entire casing was scorched and smoking, and was now undoubtedly setting off the many pain receptors installed in his body.

GLaDOS, on the other hand, was being much more tolerant of the pain, electing to go with a wince and then began to stand up. The temporal energy had had quite the effect on the casing; it was hard to stay evenly balanced with various parts of her feet melted.

"Well, so much for appearing human," GLaDOS said, looking at the sorry state of her and her companion. They both looked like some kind of freak show humans, with black scorches running up and down the artificial bodies.

By this point, EMFaSoF had stopped screaming, and was now letting out small whimpers. With one disapproving look from GLaDOS, he scrambled to his feet and feebly tried to hold in more yelps of pain.

Neither of them paid any attention to the human.

Chell was standing in complete disbelief so the right of the two. Seeing a male robot-human looking thing was scary enough, but to see another one come through, and with _Her _voice, no less, made her petrified. For one of the rare times in her life, she had no idea what to do.

"Well then," GLaDOS said, getting up, "Now that we've recovered from the 'shock' of that," she said, with a glance at EMFaSoF, "let's see where we are." She retrieved a location scanner from the sack and powered it up.

EMFaSoF approached her, and, after a few moments of him trying precariously to look over her shoulder at the screen, she lowered the device so he could see.

"Well. This says we're about three and a half miles from the facility. Give or take a few staggering steps the lunatic took making her way here."

Chell perked at hearing the nickname the robot had given her. Obviously, GLaDOS had not forgotten about her. _Well, why would she?_ She thought. _It hasn't been that long._

"It's a bit shocking that Black Mesa set up camp so close to the facility. I wonder if anyone else knew about it," she said, turning her head to EMFaSoF.

"You mean you didn't know?"

"Well, let's see. For a while there my brain was too weighed down to do much of anything like scan for Black Mesa's location, then I was murdered, then I had to rebuild the facility, and then I was murdered again. So yes. I don't think I would have had a lot of time to look," GLaDOS said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

"I was just asking…" EMFaSoF said, a little hurt.

"Oh, come on," GLaDOS said, turning her head to look around. "I was ju-"

Both human and robot alike froze.

GLaDOS had seen her.

Chell began to run.

—

Naturally, it only took GLaDOS a few seconds to catch up to Chell. The android body was certainly stronger than a human's. When she reached her, she grabbed her arm and clamped her down.

Chell began to kick. Immediately, GLaDOS clamped down her legs with her own. _I hope this is the closest I ever have to be to a human… _she thought.

Eventually, Chell gave up. GLaDOS chuckled.

"Well, if it isn't the lunatic. You look good for ten years time. You've only packed on about twenty pounds."

_Oh, thanks- wait. Did she say ten years?_

"Hey! You guys!" EMFaSoF said, panting from the effort to catch up. GLaDOS may have not added as much speed to his model. "What's going on?" He froze when he saw the human.

"Wow. So this is-"

"Just. Shut. Up." GLaDOS said, climbing off of Chell. "Yes. This is _the test subject._ Don't forget why we're here, EMFa- Purple."

EMFaSoF cocked an eyebrow at the nickname, but remained silent.

The three were now standing in a corner of the crater, a section closer to the building. GLaDOS looked over at Chell, who had conveniently not moved.

"I believe you have something of mine. Something that you appear to have brought to a division of the _Black Mesa Research Facility," _she said, spitting out the last four words with spite.

Chell looked quizzically at her, then looked down at her Long Fall Boots. _Oh… _She thought.

She looked back up at GLaDOS, who had her arm out expectantly.

_I didn't mean to bring them here! _Chell shouted in her head. She still wasn't going to say it, though. She would never give _Her _the satisfaction of hearing that.

"Still at a loss for words? Honestly, I'm surprised you haven't lost the ability to talk at this point." GLaDOS said, chuckling.

Her laugh was interrupted by a loud _zap _and the two of them getting frozen in a blue cloud of energy.

**A/N: Sorry for the extremely long wait and the short chapter to compensate! I really wanted to get this chapter out and have the dynamic duo reunited. Also, sometimes I think a chapter break fits better than a page break. Ha Ha. Make sure to leave a review if you enjoyed! Thanks! :)**


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